On Maximal Equidistant Permutation Arrays

An equidistant permutation array A(r, I ; u ) is a t' x r array defined on a symbol set V such that each row of the array is a permutation of the symbol set V and any two distinct rows of A have precisely A common column entries. Given r and i.. one can ask for the largest u such that an A(r, 2.; v) exists or find the smallest v such that an A(r, I; u ) exists which cannot be extended to an A(r. i ; u + 1). In this paper, we consider arrays of the latter type. Such arrays we call maximal. Several classes of maximal equidistant permutation arrays are given and bounds are obtained.